The present invention relates to a method of software standardization, or more in particular to a method of software standardization suitable for improving the efficiency of the maintenance work on a software that has already been developed, by unifying and standardizing the names and attributes of data items in the developed software.
Conventional effective methods of improving the efficiency of the program rewriting, maintenance, reuse and version-up work of a paperwork processing software that has already been developed, that is, the work of expanding the maintenance functions and reconstruction or shift to a new system include the one in which a developed software is converted into a standard form easy to maintain and reuse. Especially in reusing a paperwork processing software already developed, an effective approach is to standardize and unify the names and attributes of data items having the same contents used in the already-developed software.
A useful conventional system supporting this approach concerns a method proposed by the present inventors in U.S. Pat. No. 4,967,348 entitled "INTRA-PROGRAM DATA REPLACEMENT METHOD AND SYSTEM". According to this method, data items having the same contents in an existing software are detected by detecting the relationship of transfer between data items in the existing software. This is a superior method making it possible to support the whole series of work of detecting data items having the same contents, determining a standard data item and name, and replacing the names and attributes of data items in the program by the standard name and attribute, as necessary for standardizing the names and attributes of data items in an existing software.